Could a taxonomy be designed that would scale from the infinitely small to the infinitely large? Not according to the vast majority of thinkers or thinking. To my knowledge only one has been designed that would fit that bill - see at www3.sympatico.ca/cypher2/WebMindMapBook.pdf
This has been described as an index of the whole of human knowledge. Nothing else compares with its comprehensiveness, which is why all other taxonomies do NOT scale very much.

In the end all you reinforce is that a taxonomy is never perfect - my view of the universe doesn’t match your view of the universe.

I don’t think about things in discrete little packets of information. Do you? Does anyone? If we did think in this way then users wouldn’t have so much angst regarding adding metadata to their stuff. If tagging was so good then people wouldn’t be arguing how the tags I use don’t mean the same as the tags you would use to describe something.

Topic maps, IMHO, are probably the only way to recrify the problem.

Topic maps allow people to describe their information in as many different ways as they like, using taxonomies, folk taxonomies or folksonomies, and make relationships between them in the same way our brains relate bits of information together.

Let the different facets provided by the topic maps give users the navigation they need to browse and discover information, and let the technology of topic maps give us the web that joins all of the terms together in their natural relationships.

If Charles Goldfarb called topic maps “the GPS of the information universe”, its about time we swapped our paper-based street directory-like taxonomies for something a little more people friendly.

From what I can tell, Amazon’s search and its product taxonomy are pretty tightly integrated. Whenever you visit a category node, search is immediately limited to that category (e.g. office products.)

Even general search results offer taxonomy-based refinement (e.g. search for Canon).

So it’s not a simple matter of one thing versus another–search vs. taxonomies vs. folksonomies vs. whatever. It’s about how they fit together with the content, user tasks, context of use, etc.

In hindsight I don’t think I should have included folksonomies being new in my list of reasons why taxonomies are so relied upon…I wasn’t trying to set up an either/or. Apparently I’m conditioned to do so, however, because that’s what I did.

While folksonomies are indeed interesting and scalable, the question about taxonomies still interests me, even by itself.

For example, lets imagine that we’re building a product site like Amazon from scratch. How important is the taxonomy? I’ve argued in the past that the taxonomy on Amazon isn’t all that important, because most people simply search. This suggests to me that either the navigation system or the taxonomy underneath it aren’t doing as well as they could. (or, more to the point, they’re doing just fine but taxonomies don’t scale well).

Digg (news) is an interesting example. What’s interesting about news is that it can benefit greatly from very general categories, like Digg and CNN. But once you get past that initial set, I wonder how valuable they are. I think the difference is that we don’t find things in news, we actually browse…so we’re not looking things up by category, we’re simply seeing what’s new there.

And your final question is where this is headed. Pick the best tool for the job. Wouldn’t you admit that most people pick taxonomies right now as a matter of course?

What I’m really interested in is empowering users to organize their own information. Creating refinding systems that allow people to organize content from multiple sites in beneficial ways. And taxonomies, from this point of view, aren’t that dependable.

Disclaimer: no personal experience.

C’mon… that’s a great analogy.

The original question implies (I think) that you get most of the benefits of a taxonomy with a folksonomy, but with a folksonomy you also get this super-scalability. But that’s not true… there are trade-offs that are at least superficially similar to the ones in the cars/transit analogy. E.g. cars are high cost, high precision transportation; transit is low cost, low precision.

as designers we should be careful not to take practices for granted…

Absolutely. But that cuts both ways–we should also be careful not to force folksonomies onto problems that require another solution.

Is there good evidence that suggests that taxonomies work well in certain sized systems and not in others?

I would point to Digg, which has a basic subject-based classification system, and Amazon’s product taxonomy as two examples that work. There are lots of interesting examples where taxonomies are quite critical (the ICD comes to mind) but they’re not very webby.

But I think the more important point, from a web design POV, is to pick the classification systems that best fit the problem. Folksonomy + taxonomy might fit in some situations, faceted taxonomies in another, and pure folksonomies somewhere else.

In other words, it depends.

alex

I mean, as designers we should be careful not to take practices for granted, assuming certain techniques work when we don’t have great examples to rest on. And you know as well as anybody the assumptions made about taxonomies…they are assumed as the way to work for many designers, no matter what size of system they’re working on.

But let’s not get caught up with just bigness. Is there good evidence that suggests that taxonomies work well in certain sized systems and not in others? Perhaps that’s the angle to take here…to make the question more palatable.

btw: in the aftermath of my Death of IA post a lot of questions like this have arisen. We take a lot of practices for granted…and given the state of systems these days (what works and what doesn’t) perhaps we should be rethinking some of them.